Table Of ContentJEWS AND CHRISTIANS
JEWS AND CHRISTIANS
The Parting of the Ways
A.D. 70 to 135
edited by
James D. G. Dunn
The Second Durham-Tubingen Research Symposium
on Earliest Christianity and Judaism
(Durham, September, 1989)
WILLIAM B. EERDMANS PUBLISHING COMPANY
GRAND RAPIDS, MICHIGAN / CAMBRIDGE, U.K.
Originally published 1992 by J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck)
P.O. Box 2040, D-7400 Tubingen, Germany
as volume 66 in the series
Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament
This edition, with new English translations, published 1999 by
Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
255 Jefferson Ave. S.E., Grand Rapids, Michigan 49503/
P.O. Box 163, Cambridge CB3 9PU U.K.
Original material © 1992 J.CB. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), Tubingen
English translations of essays beginning on pages 39, 85, and 159
© 1999 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
03 02 01 00 99 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Durham-Tubingen Research Symposium on Earliest Christianity
and Judaism (2nd : 1989 : University of Durham)
Jews and Christians : the parting of the ways, A.D. 70 to 135 : the second
Durham-Tubingen Research Symposium on Earliest Christianity and Judaism (Durham,
September 1989) / edited by James D. G. Dunn,
p. cm.
Originally published: Tubingen : J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), cl992, in series:
Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament. With new English translations.
Includes bibliographical references and indexes.
ISBN 0-8028-4498-7 (alk. paper)
1. Judaism — Relations — Christianity — Congresses. 2. Christianity and other
religions — Judaism — Congresses. 3. Church history — Primitive and
early church, ca. 30-600 — Congresses. 4. Judaism — History —
Post-exilic period, 586 B.C-210 A.D. — Congresses.
I. Dunn, James D. G. 1939- II. Title.
BM535 .D78 1999
261.2'6'09015 — dc21
98-32398
CIP
Contents
Preface vii
"The Parting of the Ways" from the Perspective of Rabbinic Judaism 1
PHILIP S. ALEXANDER
Diaspora Reactions to the Destruction of the Temple 27
MARTIN GOODMAN
The Septuagint as a Collection of Writings Claimed by Christians:
Justin and the Church Fathers before Origen 39
MARTIN HENGEL
Syncretistic Features in Jewish
and Jewish-Christian Baptism Movements 85
HERMANN LICHTENBERGER
Matthew's Christology and the Parting of the Ways 99
GRAHAM N. STANTON
A note on the textual evidence for the omission of Matthew 9:34 117
J. NEVILLE BIRDSALL
"In Him was Life": John's Gospel and the Parting of the Ways 123
JOHN MCHUGH
The Understanding of Christ in the Pauline School: A Sketch 159
PETER STUHLMACHER
The Question of Anti-semitism in the New Testament
Writings of the Period 177
JAMES D. G. DUNN
VI Contents
The Parting of the Ways: The Evidence of Jewish
and Christian Apocalyptic and Mystical Material 213
CHRISTOPHER ROWLAND
The Parting of the Ways: Eschatology and Messianic Hope 239
ANDREW CHESTER
Jewish-Christian Relations in Barnabas and Justin Martyr 315
WILLIAM HORBURY
Problems of the Clementine Literature 347
J. NEVILLE BIRDSALL
Concluding Summary and Postscript 363
List of Contributors 369
Indexes 371
Preface
The papers which follow were first delivered at the second Durham-Tubingen
Research Symposium on Earliest Christianity and Judaism, which met at the
University of Durham in September 1989. The first symposium had met the
previous year in Tubingen and focused on an earlier stage of the relationship
between earliest Christianity and Judaism, "Paulus, Missionar und Theologe,
und das antike Judentum", the papers of which have already been published in
the same series1.
The first symposium commemorated the 50th anniversary of the great
Tubingen theologian, Adolf Schlatter, 1852-19382. It was equally fitting that
the second should honour the memory of one of the greatest scholars of earliest
Christian texts, the Bishop of Durham, Joseph Barber Lightfoot, 1828-89,
meeting as it did on the centenary of his death.
It is particularly appropriate that the spirit of Lightfoot should have presided
over a joint Durham-Tubingen research symposium and on the subject of why
and when earliest Christianity became something different from the Judaism of
the same period. For Lightfoot's scholarly work had been very largely domi
nated by his ongoing debate with F. C. Baur and the Tubingen school3. And the
main theme of their debate was very close to the theme of the 1989 symposium.
Baur indeed had defined "the ultimate, most important point of the primitive
history of Christianity" precisely as the issue of
"how Christianity, instead of remaining a mere form of Judaism ... asserted itself as
a separate, independent principle, broke loose from it, and took its stand as a new
enfranchised form of religious thought and life, essentially different from all the
national peculiarities of Judaism"4.
And Lightfoot did not disagree:
1 Paulus und das antike Judentum, hrsg. M. Hengel & U. Heckel (Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr,
1991).
2 See the Vorwort to Paulus (n. 1).
3 See particularly M. Hengel, "Bishop Lightfoot and the Tubingen School on the Gospel of
John and the Second Century", The Lightfoot Centenary Lectures (Durham University Jour
nal, 1992) 23-51.
4 F. C. Baur, Paul, the Apostle of Jesus Christ (1845; Eng. tr. London: Williams & Norgate,
1873) 3.
VIII Preface
"If the primitive Gospel was, as some have represented it, merely one of many
phases of Judaism ... then indeed St. Paul's preaching was vain and our faith is vain
also"5.
Nor did Baur und Lightfoot disagree that the overlap between Judaism and
Christianity6 was the crucial area of analysis if this "most important point of the
primitive history of Christianity", was to be clarified. It was Baur in fact who
drew to historians' attention the importance of the overlap and of the tensions
between Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians in the shaping of Christian
ity. And Lightfoot was not unwilling to recognize the extent of the fractiousness
between an expanding Gentile mission and those Christian Jews who continued
to consider themselves Jews first and Christians second7.
Where Baur and Lightfoot disagreed was at three points of significance for
the concerns of this volume. (1) Baur was willing to focus "the Christian
principle" in an ideal spirituality or religious consciousness, which "looks
beyond the outward, the accidental, the particular, and rises to the univesal, the
unconditioned, the essential"8. He could therefore sum up the relation between
Judaism and Christianity as that between Jewish particularism and Christian
universalism. Lightfoot, equally concerned lest Christianity be seen simply as
"one of many phases of Judaism", could, however, not dissolve away so readily
the classic tenets and dogmas of Christian faith regarding the person and work
of Christ. Theologically uncritical where Baur was radical, he at least recog
nized that there is a christological particularity in earliest Christianity, as
irreducible as the national particularity of Judaism. The underlying theological
question with which the symposium wrestled was precisely this: how and why
the Jewish national particularism and the Christian christological particularism
came into ever sharper confrontation until a decisive parting of the ways was
unavoidable.
(2) Baur saw a process of development and ongoing struggle between Petrine
Christianity and Pauline Christianity which did not come to resolution till the
latter part of the second century. Lightfoot did not dispute the aspect of
struggle, and thus of development as shaping the character of earliest Christian
ity. But he took it largely for granted, again rather uncritically, that the
essentials of Christian faith were established early on9, and that the battle for
5 J. B. Lightfoot, Saint Pauls Epistle to the Galatians (London: Macmillan, 1865) xi.
6 We may include in the overlap the Jewish character of Christianity, Christian Jews, Jewish
Christians and judaizing Gentile Christians.
7 "The systematic hatred of St Paul is an important fact, which we are too apt to overlook,
but without which the whole history of the Apostolic ages will be misread and misunderstood"
(Lightfoot, Galatians p. 311).
8 F. C. Baur, The Church History of the First Three Centuries (1853; Eng. tr. Williams &
Norgate, 1878-79) 33.
9 The full quotation cited above in abbreviated form (n.5) reads: "If the primitive Gospel
was, as some have represented it, merely one of many phases of Judaism, if those cherished
Preface IX
the soul of Christianity had been fought by Paul and already won in the first two
generations of Christianity10. These issues too were at the heart of the sym
posium's debate: to what extent was the character of Christianity already
established within the time of Paul (or even earlier?), and to what extent is the
Christianity which emerged in the middle of the second century the product of
the tensions experienced during the pulling apart of Christianity and Judaism?
To what extent, in other words, was "the parting of the ways" between Christ
ianity and Judaism inevitable and unavoidable from the first, and to what extent
was that parting itself a historical accident? And, we may add, to what extent
are these mutually incompatible alternatives?
(3) The third decisive difference between Baur and Lightfoot was over
method. Baur began with exegetical conclusions drawn from the undisputed
Pauline letters, indicating „the opposition between Petrine and Pauline Christ
ianity in the earliest church"11, but he then extrapolated them to the whole
history of Christian beginnings, read through the lenses of an overarching
philosophical schema. Lightfoot began, but also continued unbendingly stead
fast with rigorous historical analysis of language and context: how these words
would have been understood, given the usage of the time; how these arguments
or episodes fit into what we know of the history of the period from other
sources. There can be no doubt which of the two produced the more convincing
and lasting results. If Baur asked legitimate and still pertinent theological
questions, Lightfoot provided an essential methodology to answer such ques
tions insofar as they relate to historical texts and events of Christian beginnings.
It is also significant that Lightfoot delivered the coup de grace for Baur's
reconstruction of early Christianity by means of his magisterial study of Cle
ment and particularly of Ignatius12. For in these volumes he demonstrated
beyond reasonable doubt that seven letters are to be attributed to the Ignatius
of Antioch who was martyred in about 110, and thus was able to provide a firm
historical timescale for the state of affairs which these letters reflect well in
advance of Baur's. The same instinct pushed the symposium to focus on the
period between the Jewish revolts (70—132), a hunch that the years between
apostolic age and post apostolic age, between second Temple Judaism and
rabbinic Judaism, between the Jewish Christianity of James and Jerusalem and
beliefs which have been the life and light of many generations were afterthoughts, progressive
accretions, having no foundation in the Person and Teaching of Christ, then indeed St Paul's
preaching was vain and our faith is vain also."
10 "The great battle with this form of error (Ebionism) seems to have been fought out at an
early date, in the lifetime of the Apostles themselves and in the age immediately following"
(Galatians p. 336).
11 I refer, of course, to Baur's seminal essay - "Die Christuspartei in der Korinthischen
Gemeinde, der Gegensatz des petrinischen und paulinischen Christentums in der alteren
Kirche, der Apostel Petrus in Rom", Tub. Z. Th. V: 4 (1831) 61-206.
12 The Apostolic Fathers. Part II, S. Ignatius, S. Poly carp (London: Macmillan, 1885).
